Donald O'Donovan

Goodreads Author

Donald O'Donovan is an optioned screenwriter and voice actor with film and audio book credits. He was born in Cooperstown, New York. A teenage runaway, O'Donovan rode freights, traveled the U.S., joined the army to get off the street, lived in Mexico, and worked at more than 200 occupations including long distance truck driver, undertaker and roller skate repairman.

The first draft of his novel NIGHT TRAIN was written on twenty-three yellow legal pads while the author was homeless on the streets of Los Angeles.

I shall cultivate the radish and the turnipMahatma Suzy, her glorious hair awash, her swollen nipples pup-tenting her mauve turtleneck, nibbled a previously-owned Kalamata frittata and leisurely turned the pages of Catherine de Medici’s Book of the Hours. “I have done with war,” she muttered into her beard, then springing from her downy couch, she gazed out over the Jornada del Muerto, a burnin...
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Connie, thanks for your message and whatever it was that you did. I haven't figured out Goodreads enough yet to know my way around. Best wishes, DonalConnie, thanks for your message and whatever it was that you did. I haven't figured out Goodreads enough yet to know my way around. Best wishes, Donald...more
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Beautiful, Teri. A comprehensive and optimistic (for edge city desperadoes like me) view of things. As for the New York publishers... How the mighty aBeautiful, Teri. A comprehensive and optimistic (for edge city desperadoes like me) view of things. As for the New York publishers... How the mighty are fallen! Adios motherf---ers!...more
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Alone in the Company of Others by Kelly Huddleston is a book for readers (I count myself among them) who believe that the journey is at least as important as the destination. Alone is neither a page turner that we must gobble up as quickly as possiblAlone in the Company of Others by Kelly Huddleston is a book for readers (I count myself among them) who believe that the journey is at least as important as the destination. Alone is neither a page turner that we must gobble up as quickly as possible nor a whodunit that requires the exercise of our armchair sleuthing skills, but rather it is an invitation to linger on the page, savor the moment, surrender to the flow and let Huddleston’s exquisite music wash over us and through us. A friend of mine who read a few pages of Alone complained that it was confusing, and I admit that at times Huddleston seems to be throwing handfuls of confetti at the us—I mean the rapid succession of characters and events, like wave after wave of soldiers storming a beachhead, but as we read on we discover that these multicolored bits and pieces of information are actually threads that resolve themselves quite readily into a tapestry that is artfully and intricately interwoven.

The novel is narrated by Huddleston’s alter ego, the nubile heroine Camille who is in love with her hunky cousin Russell. Camille lives in a household of great talkers, a regular Greek chorus of them, in fact: Connie, Camille’s mother, who is “nothing but a gear-grinding machine spitting out vowels,” Nurse Regina, who spends “a great deal of time misquoting famous dead people,” the Triplets, who have their own special language ”full of slurred vowels and biting consonants,” Wanda, a voluble veterinarian, and the novelist Andrew, who declares that “squid fishing is a religious experience.” Cousin Wilsie is the family historian. In lieu of talking, he records everything others say on a toy tape recorder and scribbles his own comments on a hand-held blackboard. Huddleston’s Greek chorus is topped off by Duck-Duck, a mute girl who doesn’t speak at all.

The author’s orchestral treatment of her material is not limited to her characters and their voices, however. It includes iconic objects such as Teresa’s paperweight dove that killed the voyeur Dennis Goody and Clive Hutch’s gold-plated bowling ball, and themes (before and after the fall, “cousin lust,” hitchhiking men), and all of these interwoven themes, characters, objects and voices come and go like motifs in a symphony.

Huddleston, in this superb non-linear novel, displays an adroit handling of shifting timelines without resorting to cumbersome and patronizing flashback devices. We can easily lay our hands on plenty of novels that follow the familiar conventional linear structure, but a large percentage of these books are unreadable because their sentences are stacked one on top of the other like wooden planks. We don’t want wooden-plank sentences whose sole object is to move the characters and the reader from point A to point B because this sort of thing is dull and formulaic. A literary novel—and Alone is unquestionably a literary novel—must have texture. It must have patina. It must have style. The words must dance and sparkle and cavort as well as carry the story forward. And in Alone we have it. Word-magic, I mean. Kelly Huddleston unfurls her lyric weaponry on every page, without fail.

Huddleston’s precocious heroine-narrator, Camille, the spideress who weaves this magical web, is engaging, literate, quick with her thoughts, sassy and thoroughly unconventional. In other words, she’s good company. You want to stick around while she works the pedals of her loom. You want to hang out with her, to linger on the page, to savor the moment, and consequently, you don’t want this book to end. Alone in the Company of Others does end, of course, and the ending is brilliant, but that’s all I’m going to say about that.

Alone in the Company of Others, by Kelly Huddleston. Read this book. Savor it. Linger over the pages as you would linger over an exquisite meal shared with good friends.

“My grandfather was a railroad brakeman, sixty years with the D&H. I'd sit on his lap when I was little, I remember, at the upstairs apartment on Watkins Avenue in Oneonta overlooking the tracks, and we'd look out at the yard together and watch the trains hooking up, and he'd pull his gold watch out of his vest pocket and squint at the dial, a gold pocket watch, and the bulging surface of the watch case was all scritch-scratched, etched with tiny soft lines, hundreds of tiny scratches, interlaced. And then he'd check the yard, my Grandpa, to see if the trains were running on time. In those days there was a rhythm to everything, there was an order to things, but now we're riding a runaway train that's carrying us all away to that final night where nothing is remembered and nothing matters.”
―
Donald O'Donovan,
Night Train: A Novel

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